he diet, that he threatened to resign his royalty,
and retire into his own hereditary dominions. This design was extremely
disagreeable to the people in general, who espoused his cause in
opposition to the diet, by whom they conceived themselves more oppressed
than they should have been under an unlimited monarchy.

MEASURES TAKEN BY THE KING OF PRUSSIA AND ELECTOR OF HANOVER.

The king of Prussia, alarmed at these formidable alliances, ordered all
his forces to be completed, and held in readiness to march at the first
notice; and a report was industriously circulated, that by a secret
article in the late treaty between France and the house of Austria,
these two powers had obliged themselves to destroy the protestant
religion, and overturn the freedom of the empire, by a forced election
of a king of the Romans. The cry of religion was no impolitic measure;
but it no longer produced the same effect as in times past. Religion was
made a pretence on both sides; for the partisans of the empress-queen
insinuated, on all occasions, that the ruin of the catholic faith in
Germany was the principal object of the new alliance between the kings
of Great Britain and Prussia. It was in consequence of such suggestions,
that his Britannic majesty ordered his electoral minister at the diet,
to deliver a memorial to all the ministers at Ratisbon, expressing his
surprise to find the treaty he had concluded with the king of Prussia
industriously represented as a ground of apprehension and umbrage,
especially for religion. He observed, that as France had made open
dispositions for invading the electorate of Hanover, and disturbing the
peace of the empire; that as he had been denied, by the empress-queen,
the succours stipulated in treaties of alliance; and as he was refused
assistance by certain states of the empire, who even seemed disposed to
favour such a diversion: he had, in order to provide for the security
of his own dominions, to establish peace and tranquillity in the
empire, and maintain its system and privileges, without any prejudice to
religion, concluded a defensive treaty with the king of Prussia; that,
by this instance of patriotic zeal for the welfare of Germany, he had
done an essential service to the empress-queen, and performed the part
which the head of the empire, in dignity and duty, ought to have acted;
that time would demonstrate how little it was the interest of the
empress-queen to engage in a strict allian